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Leaving behind his crumpled mother with competing feelings of disgust and longing for her glory days of radiant, knee-weakening red hair and run-free hose, Jack flees his taboo-transgressing penury in order to inveigle his way into the United States Navy and swap the dust and grime of urban-hopping for that of the salt and spray of chasing islands. The hardships and hard knocks, con jobs and concupiscence, back-slapping and backhanding, grifts and griefs, sad sacks and sack-hopping of A Garden of Sand have been transferred from the depression-daubed thirties to the war-jazzed forties, and Jack stakes his claim to what he can manage from life in the Second World War and the Korean hiccup that closed out the decade. The world hasn't gotten a smidgen easier to get by in—and while Thompson's opening book placed the reader inside the mind of a tough-lotted boy with uncanny verisimilitude, the sequel amps up the testosterone to seat us behind the eyes of a young man whose past haunts and invigorates him, and who realizes that you can take chances when you have nothing to lose. Where Jack winds up doesn't seem to bear as much importance as what he does—and who he fucks—along the way there. A slice of sweaty, blue-collar life from a bygone era captured in hard-edges on the page.

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Earl Thompson ( May 24, 1931 – November 9, 1978 ) was a leading American writer of naturalist prose. Nominated for the National Book Award for A Garden of Sand and chosen by the Book of the Month Club for Tattoo, Thompson died suddenly at the peak of his success, having published just three novels—the fourth The Devil to Pay, was published posthumously.